If it ain't broke: B&B Italia's Charles sofa

Priding itself on its motto ‘Timeless and treasured’, B&B Italia strikes a finely tuned balance between cutting-edge design and a timeless aesthetic which renders many of its past creations covetable today. Look no further than Antonio Citterio’s Charles seating system of 1997, which is capacious and comfortable yet elegant for seeming to hover on its slender but robust, die-cast aluminium legs.

This year is the 20th birthday of Charles, and when B&B Italia asked Citterio if he would like to update it, his answer was to the point: ‘No, because Charles still looks contemporary’. In fact, 20 years on, Charles is still the company’s bestselling product worldwide.

An iconic, timeless design embodying a contemporary lifestyle, Charles owes its immense success to the research and innovation that went into its creation and to its resulting aesthetic — values integral to B&B Italia’s DNA and all of its projects. Another reason for Charles’s longevity is its versatile, modular design: its 16 elements allow the user to create linear, corner and ‘peninsula’ configurations.

Although its design has remained untouched to date, to mark the anniversary B&B Italia launched a special version in two new colourways — orange/red and grey/blue — and presented it in a special setting conceived by Migliore + Servetto Architects, which graces B&B Italia’s stores around the world. Charles is given a prominent place there, accompanied by a large timeline highlighting key events of the past 20 years — from the creation of the first cloned sheep, Dolly, in the 1990s to the discovery five years ago of seven ‘exoplanets’, suggesting that the human race might survive on other planets. In the midst of these tumultuous changes, Charles stands serenely timeless, forever modern — a constant in B&B Italia’s legendary history.

Last year, the company celebrated its own 50th anniversary with three parallel, complementary cultural events — a documentary film, an exhibition and a book. These drew attention to the history of this extraordinarily innovative company, originally founded in 1966 by the late Piero Ambrogio Busnelli, a visionary and astute businessman, from a variety of perspectives. It was he who had the brainwave of creating furniture by injecting cold polyurethane foam into moulds.

Early on, he collaborated with the most avant-garde designers of the day, including Gaetano Pesce, Mario Bellini and Afra and Tobia Scarpa. Since then, the firm’s legendary Research & Development Centre has produced classic pieces by such equally experimental creatives as Citterio, Patricia Urquiola, Zaha Hadid, Barber & Osgerby and many others.

Now Piero’s son Giorgio is the company’s CEO, and it was he who instigated the anniversary’s special projects that attracted enormous attention from all over the world, and, to the delight of B&B Italia, were greeted with unanimous enthusiasm.

The great success of last year projects marked the beginning of a new communications strategy, via multimedia platforms and events, that views culture as a vehicle for the most meaningful aspects of design, itself a compound of culture and ethics. It manifests itself in the company’s strong commitment to support initiatives with a high cultural, artistic content — a plan that focuses on each of its founding values and takes the form of such media as art, photography, video and the performing arts.

The first of these projects, launched this year, revolves around the value of ‘timeless design’, an ideal, surely, that every designer, architect and artist aspires to. A lyrical meditation on the theme of duration, this takes the form of a documentary in homage to Peter Handke — the Austrian writer and essayist who wrote the scripts for some of Wim Wenders’ most memorable films and won the 2009 Franz Kafka Prize — and his poem entitled To Duration.

B&B Italia co-produced the film, conceived by Didi Gnocchi and shot at Handke’s home in Chaville, France, with 3D Produzioni. The documentary includes such observations by Handke as ‘The path to duration is loyalty’ and ‘We always belittle aesthetics, though aesthetics is but the application of ethics’, which mirror B&B Italia’s mission to achieve timeless design excellence.

© Architonic